


You die like angels sing

by Wade (monzi)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Reconciliation, Reunion Fic, because im a sucker for 2nd person pov ok, damm wade back at it again with the scarce dialogue, minimum editing because i suck, only mentioned in passing no worries, or at least in this fic they do, second person POV aimed at Reaper, these two border on co-dependency, un-betaed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 01:33:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8601982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monzi/pseuds/Wade
Summary: You’re still undead. You’re still in pain, every cell of your body screams with the agony of dissolving and reforming. You aren’t any more alive than you were hours, days ago.But here, hovering over Jack with him still soft, still warm, still breathing, you think it comes damm close.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, yeah, i know. I should be working on chapter 2 of Of White Gloves and Favours. but that was going hella slow, and i just wanted to get something out. So i picked this out of my WIPs folder and finished it in one rainy night (surrounded by about five different cats).
> 
> I dont even know what to say about this. it gets super fucking sappy at then end. sue me.
> 
> a l s o, it was MEANT to be much longer. i had a ton more ideas in mind to add, but i just wanted to finish something tonight and get it posted, so i decided to Deal With That Later. hence the new series. still, i'll only be picking at this from time to time when inspiration for The Winding Road wanes, so no worries, thats still my main priority. Ch2 of OWAF is about halfway done, anyway.
> 
> (also, im not sure if the rating is right. hmu if u think i should change it)

Gunpowder and sweat and old leather, but underneath all that, it’s still _his_ scent. His blood on your knuckles.

“It’s you.” It’s his voice too, if old and gravely and broken. “It’s still you.” He sounds like he could cry, but the black tar that passes for your blood is frozen in your veins.

Is it still you? Still him? Didn’t you die, both of you?

His breath comes in short, quick heaves of his chest. He’s just about to hyperventilate, and you could laugh at the pathetic image he cuts, here: beaten and bloody and crying at the sight of a ghost that sits astride him with a fist still raised. You haven’t drawn breath in half a decade, and you certainly won’t now, but you can feel the air catch in your throat nonetheless. How frustrating that he still makes the impossible happen. Even more that you let him.

Gloved hands paw feebly at any part of you that they can reach. Your legs, your arms, the edges of your coat, your torso. They dip into the grooves of your armor and you know it, you know that touch. You know Jack Morrison like you know yourself, maybe more. But you have to be _sure_ , because while you hadn’t made peace with it exactly, you had at least resigned yourself to never see eyes that blue ever again. You don’t trust the world not to send you a mirage so accurate to make you suffer.

You catch his hands before they can press the release on your mask. That would be the last step; to lose the mask and become _Gabriel_ , the man, and not the corpse. You place them on your shoulders instead, release them after a firm grip. There’s a message in the gesture, and he nods his assent. He won’t move them from their spot.

You run your clawed fingers down from his wrists, with just enough pressure that he’ll feel the touch under the fabric. You feel his tremors, that full-body shiver. Fingers grip your shoulders in a bruising hold, but they stay where they are. With a hand on each side of his head you remove the lower part of his ask and the shattered remains of the visor.

It’s… not the face you remember. Not exactly. Certainly the features are right; the same nose, the same cheekbones, the same thin lips. You cover his eyes with one hand. You can’t bear to look at them just yet. You don’t know how to feel.

Anyone could wear his face. There is so much doubt and, worse yet, _hope_ in you that it chokes you. It’s a leash on your throat that tightens with every passing second, _but you have to know_. His hands tighten and relax where they are, calming, grounding, though you don’t know for who’s sake it is.

There is a way. One that no one could cheat, no matter their skills. You could reach into his very essence, taste it, see for yourself just who this person thinks he _is_ to show up like this, wearing the face of a dead man. You’ve never done this without killing the recipient first, but you’d do anything right now if it meant you could be sure. If it meant you could stop mourning.

With your free hand you reach for the zipper of his jacket and pry it open to fall at his sides. You can see the way his chest expands with every rapid breath even through the light flex armor. You place your hand bellow his collarbone and _reach_. His entire body tenses as a high-pitched keen fills the air, but there is no blood, no tear, no injury. His legs kick, his back arches; he’s fighting his own body just to stay still but you press down harder on him anyway. Claws dig deeper into his being, beyond any physical state of being, beyond solidity, but the pain is there anyway. You can’t do anything about that; there is nothing comfortable about having your soul choked and prodded at.

Just a piece, that’s all you need. To make sure he is who he claims to be, who you wish he were. Who you _need_ him to be.

He goes limp when you remove your hand, but not unconscious. His arms fall at his sides, he hasn’t got the strength to hold on to your shoulders anymore, but he does tread his fingers weakly into your coat like the lack of contact will kill him.

There’s a circle of light in your palm. It flutters and blinks like a firefly, but infinitely more fragile. You lean forward and consume it.

If it were anyone else’s soul this wouldn’t be so hard. It would be a simple matter of filtering out the useless memories and focusing on the ones you need, but you can’t help but reel back. It’s _him_ , Jack, _the sun_. The images and sounds and feelings are too much, and you let yourself be overcome by them lest you’re torn apart.

_Fields of gold and blue skies reflected in his eyes. The clean air of a rural life._

_Rising with the sun. The chill of early morning. The night was never quiet; alive with the sounds of summer insects singing to the moon._

_They called his a “rambunctious youth”. They didn’t know what he was running from._

_Hiding in the barn. Bruised ribs, his father’s fists. Blood on his lips._

_Nothing from his mother. She’d never made it her business to be a big part of his life._

_Leaving home at eighteen. The solid structure of the military. The beginning of the first omnic war. Being chosen for the SEP._

_But mostly, there’s **you**._

_Gabriel, on that first meeting that neither of them knew would be so meaningful. Gabriel, a rising star among the elite soldiers chosen for the program. Gabriel, crumbling in the privacy of their room, muscle fiber and bones shifting like mercury but heavy like lead. The only solid thing during those fevered nights was each other._

_Gabriel, the only thing real when all the other subjects dropped and died like flies._

_They made you perfect. Called you a complete success, despite the high mortality rates of the experiment, the results were worth it. A one-man army, each of you. But they never understood that each of you were only ever parts of a whole._

_Gabriel, molten metal at his feet after another victory. Standing proud even with broken bones and dirt under his fingernails._

_Saving Jack’s life after another reckless half-baked plan, even if it earned them another win._

_Forming Overwatch, building it from the base the UN set, making it something bigger than it ever should have been._

_Running Overwatch, right into the ground. Failing the world and each other._

_Gabriel, Gabriel—_

“Gabriel,” he says your name between breaths, still heaving from having his very core shaken and torn.

You drop your hands to the ground, one at each side of his head. You can barely hold yourself up, the weight of memory and feeling pressing you down, down, right into the man who chants your name like it’s something precious. You couldn’t breathe if you tried, the pressure on your chest is too much to bear, and you think it could kill you when fire and shrapnel couldn’t.

When you feel his hands slip under your jaw, to the back of your neck, press the release of the skull you wear for a face, you don’t stop him. You’re too distracted by the effort of staying solid even when your body wants nothing more than to dissolve to dust and ash. The mask falls to the floor, the sound of it hitting the cold cement is jarring. You both flinch.

Red and black eyes open, though you can’t remember having closed them. The way your eyes find his, it’s like magnetism, like the force of gravity. You could fight it, but you know you’d always lose.

“It’s still you.” This time it’s your voice that says the words. You let yourself fall to those parted lips.

The taste is indescribable, as it always has been. You’ve tried and tried and _tried_ , but you were never able to put a name to it. It’s Jack, pure and unfiltered. Perfect in the way his tongue dances with yours; in the way his breath hitches at a particularly hard nip to his lower lip. You cup his face in your hands like one would hold a bird, to tip his head this way and that, to adjust the angle and fall deeper into that warm mouth. But it’s not _enough_ ; it’s not deep enough, not close enough. You could bleed into him, become a single, _perfect_ entity, and it still wouldn’t be close enough.

You want to devour Jack Morrison as much you’d like to prop him up in a glass case and admire him from afar.

He grips your hair. With much difficulty, you peel yourself off of him. His chest, pressed to yours with barely a hair’s breadth between them, rises and falls heavily. Your lungs expand and contract to the same rhythm, a hollow mimicry of the human body. His hands leave your neck to rove over your back instead, and you can taste the frustration rolling off his body in waves when his touch meets nothing but hard leather and armor. You’ve loved this, always, how he won’t be still until he has you under his fingernails.

This will have to do for now: one of your gloves disappears with a thought and you slip one naked digit slip under his shirt. An electric shock pierces your veins at his whimper. You push the fabric aside to press your whole palm to his hip, thumb pressing at the hollow. With a whine, he presses your body even harder. You hum pleasantly, and nuzzle into his neck to find his pulse with your tongue.

His skin is as unbearably warm as you remember. Nothing like your own feverish temperature; the heat comes off you in waves as a side effect to the decay and regeneration that keep you hanging somewhere between living and dead. You never seem to swing one way or the other, always caught between both states of being in some sort of limbo. Jack doesn’t mind the heat. Jack is too distracted trying to press your bodies even closer, as if you could stick together with enough pressure. You wish, as much as he does, that it could be possible.

The high neck of his shirt is the way. Sharp, unforgiving talons tear it to shreds and, finally, that delectable patch of skin is freed. You dive in to take in more of that taste with no name, the scent of him, like you’re starving for it. You very well may be; not for the first time you wonder how you made it through the past six years without _this_. For all your success as a mercenary, and all the progress you’ve made in your search for answers, you couldn’t possibly call that thriving, living.

Now, in this abandoned Overwatch facility, you’re still undead. You’re still in pain, every cell of your body screams with the agony of dissolving and reforming. You aren’t any more alive than you were hours, days ago.

But here, hovering over Jack with him still soft, still warm, still breathing, you think it comes damm close.

You think it would be fine if you lay like this for as long as either of you have left to live, tucked into the crook of his neck, licking and biting and delighting at every sound he makes against your tongue. But that isn’t where he wants your mouth. Jack has never been one for patience, and it seems time hasn’t done anything to change that, with the way he pulls your lips back to his. It could be the influence of desperation, perhaps, though you’ve always felt something in the same vein every time you come together like this. It’s something more like hunger, or survival.

The building could crumble around you and neither of you would take any notice. You and him, a tangle of limbs on the cold, hard floor. Curled around each other into an amorphous, writhing mess. Jack gives you no play in his hold: he keeps one hand on the back of your head while the other roams to touch anything in its reach, his legs wrapped around your waist so tightly it’s starting to hurt. But you don’t mind this kind of pain, revel in it instead.

Your own hands haven’t been idle. Though you continue to kiss him, barely giving him space to breath, the hand on his stomach has long since pulled his shirt up as much as it can under the chest piece. Maybe it’d been foolish of you to think you could keep to something as innocent as static skin-to-skin contact. The muscle of his abdomen ripple and he makes a sound in the back of his throat as to grab and caress as of much of him as you can. He’d been ticklish around here before. You’re glad to see it hasn’t changed. It had been one of his more endearing aspects, one that you took advantage of often.

He shivers beneath you, but not out of pleasure. There are holes in the roof, most of the windows are shattered. There is no protection against the freezing temperatures outside, and he is woefully underdressed to ward off the cold. More than that, you had been fighting him before you realized just whose blood you’d drawn. Looking for the same thing: any hint to solving the puzzle of Overwatch’s fall, any direction to point you towards the people who ruined your life.

Pulling away is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but you gather enough self-control to put some distance between the two of you. He tries to chase after you to no avail, your hands keep his shoulders planted firmly on the concrete. The confusion (and mild hurt) on his face pulls at your heart, so you grant him one last chaste kiss. His eyes flutter closed when you hold his face in your hands, thumbing at those elegant cheekbones. His cheeks are tinted pink, from the cold or exhilaration. His lips red and kiss-swollen and all too inviting.

Despite your inhuman warmth pressed against him, his temperature is dropping from lying on the ground. It can’t be comfortable either, and though he hasn’t complained yet you know he’ll be sore later. This abandoned structure, empty save for the two of you and the memories between you, is no place for this kind of reunion.

“Hey,” you whisper against his lips. His eyes, blue as the flames of his soul, open again. “There’s a town a few miles from here. We can rest up there and come back later. What do you say?”

He groans and mumbles something unintelligible.

“What’s that?”

“I said, I don’t wanna move,” he says under his breath, words slurring. You laugh. The sentiment is mutual, but you’d much rather cuddle on an actual bed.

“You’ll catch a cold, baby. Come on.” You run a hand through his soft, snowy hair, trying to coax him into compliance. He makes no move to rise, instead he nuzzles into your palm like a big, sleepy cat. But when you begin to untangle your limbs from him he surges to renew his hold around you, even tighter than before. The movement is so sudden it startles you.

“Jackie?”

When you move to pry him off, just enough to look at his face, he presses closer and buries his nose in your neck. A whimper rumbles in his chest, and just like that, you understand.

You sit up and maneuver his body to sit on your lap. Pressing kisses against his temple where a bruise is forming from your brawl earlier (another reason to get out of here and deal with it somewhere more comfortable), you press your palm between his shoulders blades. Deep inside, the shimmering light of his essence is encased. You fight down a wave of longing for it. Instead, you focus on the warm weight of him astride your thighs.

“Jack, look at me,” you murmur against the crown of his head. He shakes his head and only partly succeeds in suppressing another whine. “Shh, it’s okay.”

There were times like this, in the past, when the weight of life got to be too heavy for either of you to carry on your shoulders. When he or you broke down, it would go like this: a quiet space wherever you could find it, him in your arms, and you humming a broken tune you forget where your first heard.

Getting the notes past your perpetually parched throat isn’t easy, but it has the same effect. As the tension bleeds off your shoulders, his body relaxes in turn. Your breaths synchronize, taking deep, eight-second gulps of air. Finally, Jack unfurls and raises his eyes to yours. His voice a broken thing when he speaks.

“ _Don’t leave_.”

You press your forehead to his. “Couldn’t if I tried.”

The sigh he heaves, pure relief, it’s like the wind got knocked out him. You would be lying if you said you didn’t feel the same way.

Separating now would break you both, and this time there would be nothing left to salvage.

You don’t plan on letting that happen, and neither does Jack.

When he leans up for another kiss, you don’t hesitate to indulge him. The contact is _good_ , something you thought you’d never feel again considering everything that’s happened. Now that Jack is back you don’t think you could live another day without those lips on your own. For a moment, you simply sit there, breathing in tandem.

You run a thumb over his chin. “Ready to go?” He nods.

When you’re stable enough to stand, he takes your hand in his. His smile as he looks down at your intertwined fingers is the softest you’ve ever seen, and you know you were being truthful. You couldn’t walk away from him if you wanted to.

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [Tumblr](http://wakeupwade.tumblr.com/post/153417873759/you-die-like-angels-sing)


End file.
